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Art / Artists / Fine Art

Misty Copeland created her own history as the first Black woman to be the American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancer. Now, America’s most famous ballerina is reinterpreting history by appearing in re-creations of French artist Edgar Degas’ historic works on ballerinas.

Latino contributions to U.S. history remain largely absent from high school history books, and John Leguizamo is doing something about it. The 51-year-old actor and comedian sat down with HuffPost Live’s

Issa Rae Diop (1985- ), better known as Issa Rae, is a Black American television producer, writer and director. She is best known for “Awkward Black Girl” (2011), which went viral on YouTube a few years back. She is now working on the television show “Insecure” for HBO, still in development. The main character is loosely based on her.

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At White private schools she stood out because she was Black. At Black and Latino public schools she was mocked for acting too “White”.

Misty Copeland (1982- ), an American classical ballet dancer, in 2015 became the first Black American woman ever to become a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). That makes her one of the top ballerinas at one of the top classical ballet companies in the world! Mikhail Baryshnikov was a principal at ABT.

In the US, ballet is mainly seen as a White thing. Accordingly, many assume that rail-thin White women make the best ballerinas. But, as Copeland herself has shown, that comes from prejudice, not from the demands of the art.

Copeland did not start ballet till age 13. Many professionals start at age three. Yet she could do in months what took most girls years of practice.

Born in 1901, William H. Johnson was a talented artist who became famous for his Scandinavian landscape paintings and “primitive” scenes of black life.
A South Carolina native and son of an African-American/Sioux woman and a white man, Johnson moved to New York in 1918 to study at the National Academy of Design

Hello and welcome to Xica Nation. Could you tell us your name, age, nation and how you identify?

Celeste De Luna, 40, Xicana, I identify myself as an indigenous person of the North American continent, one in the process of trying to decolonize my mind and spirit and that of my family. The loss is so great that it feels insurmountable sometimes, but I look to my communities for help.

Fred Wilson blurs the line between art and curating by designing a museum exhibition space in Sweden that reorients archeological pieces to create new contextual meanings. “I would like to think that objects have memories, and that we have memories about certain objects,” he says. “A lot of what I do is eliciting memory from an object.” Mounting tear-shaped black glass drips on a white wall, and later creating prints of black spots, Wilson reflects on how he was “shunned” as a black child in an all-white school. “A lot of my project is trying to understand the visual world around me,” he says. “What is me, and what is something that the rest of the world has said I am?”

Also see: Indian termination policyDuring 1953–1964, more than 100 tribes were terminated, approximately 1,365,801 acres (5,527 km2) of trust land were removed from protected status, and 13,263 Native Americans lost tribal affiliation. –Effects
From the native standpoint, Northern Cheyenne former U.S. Senator from Colorado Ben Nighthorse Campbell said of assimilation and termination in a speech delivered in Montana:
“ If you can’t change them, absorb them until they simply disappear into the mainstream culture. …In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years. ”
—- Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Opening Keynote Address

Humanæ is a chromatic inventory, a project that reflects on the colors beyond the borders of our codes by referencing the PANTONE® color scheme.
The project development is based on a series of portraits whose background is dyed with the exact Pantone® tone extracted from a sample of 11×11 pixels of the portrayed´s face. The project’s objective is to record and catalog all possible human skin tones.
Humanæ it’s a pursuit for highlighting our subtle-continuous of our tones that make more equality than difference… our true colors, rather than the untrue Red and Yellow, Black and White. It is a kind of game for subverting our codes. The audience is free to read into it. The ultimate goal is to provoke and bring currently using internet as a discussion platform on ethnic identity, creating images that lead us to match us independent from factors such as nationality, origin, economic status, age or aesthetic standards.

(All the portrayed are volunteers, people who approach to the project, visit the space in which I am portraying and decide to participate on their own by a Internet call on the Facebook page, on Tumblr ,using public spaces in Madrid, Barcelona, Winterthur, Bergen, Daegu, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paris and Chicago)

(PANTONE® Guides are one of the main classification systems of colors, which are represented by an alphanumeric code, allowing to accurately recreate any of them in any media. It is a technical industrial standard often called Real Color)